Our New Neighbour.......

......will be from yesterday be known as Harry; "Hatchet" Harry..... whether that's his name or not :D

He moved in just before Christmas and all has been quiet until the last few days, until he obvisouly got bored and decided to to start some exterior rearranging of the hedges and trees...

First he levelled a conifer hedge on his front alongside a public footpath from about 12ft to 6ft - badly I might add..but hey ho, up to him

Next up and most annoying he cut the head off a 12ft Elder tree at the end of our hedge running along the bottom of our garden, the tree wasn't even hanging over his property it was bordering the public footpath along the other side of our garden

Then OUR 'well kept' hawthorn hedge which is running along the bottom of our garden and which he has a 6ft fence plus 3ft of reed screening on top along his side of it was next on his hit list. Standing on ladders he leaned over and duely reduced that to around 6ft from around 9ft, lower than his fence as we can now see his reed screening

I know our hedge seemed high but it wasn't blocking light and it was well maintained and given that our property is higher than theirs and was giving 'them' privacy from us and the footpath; you'd have thought that might have come in to consideration. Funny thing is I put something back in our shed yesterday afternoon and I could read the front cover of a newspaper that his wife was reading in their conservatory !!!, where as I could barely see the conservatory before.

After that I heard him having an 'exchange of words' with his other neighbour as they have a conifer hedge on the other side of his garden that is a good 20ft high; it looks very imposing BUT is very well maintained even for a hedge that is so high. He wants his neighbour to reduce it to 6ft!!!

Then the thing that made me laugh and which confirmed that "Hatchet" has a fixation with things being 6ft tall was when, for his 'piece de resistance' he proudly reduced a stunning sorbus tree in his back garden lovingly grown by the previous neighbours to, you guessed it nothing more than a 6ft stump with no branches to speak of!!!

Nothing worth falling out over, life's too short for that, the only godsend being that he has at least done his 'hatchet' job at the right time of year before the birds start nesting. Thing is if he had asked about OUR hedge I would probably have given him a hand from our side, although there would have to have been a compramise on how much would have been cut off !!!

"Some Mothers do av em"

 

OH Bilbo
:nono: that is just not nice:gaagh:

i know you say that you wont fall out with him ( to which i think is a great idea ) but that said he cant just go leaning over his fencing to lop down your trees/shrubs
he can only cut what is hanging over his side

casually mention to him you would prefere to do the trimming on your side :D

if that doesnt work .......do what i did when this happened to me a few years back i put a lenth of chicken wire along the edge of the hedge on thier garden side so that as it grew the hedge intwined with the wire

the next time he HAD A GO at my hedge he spent most of the day trying to get the hedge trimmers running smoothly as the wire had got caught between the blades:OUCH::OUCH: he didnt speak to me few a weeks but he never cut the hedge again :yess::yess::yess:

but hoping that Harry hatchet behaves from here on in

 

you need to have a face to face chat with him and make it known that you are well cheesed off

there is neighbourly 'etiquette' when it comes to pruning hedges and shrubs that border your neighbour's gardens

tell him in future that if he intends to prune any shrub or hedge that originates on your side of the boundary, he needs to confirm with you prior to hacking it

 

I agree with Dim!
This control freak/bully is now feeling rather chuffed with himself, so it's time to pee on his parade. Is the elder is on public land?

 

Take a foot off his reed screening, see how he likes it.

 

I'd have been livid

My neighbour moved in about 4 years ago and his first job was to completely strip his garden....

he's concreted every inch of his back garden and tarmac'd every inch of his front....he then also reached over his back fence a proceeded to cut 3ft off his other neighbours hedge......hence they aren't talking now.....

I have ivy growing up our ajoining fence and it's quite funny whatching him snip any leaf that grows over....

I understand that some folk just aren't into gardening (actually i don't:D) and yes each to their own.....but he doesn't complain when he gets the odd bag of tomatos,salad stuff,eggs and a bit of fruit and veg from mine...We've had our 'words' and he knows where he stands with me:Dwe suffer each other i think ....just.........

 

Report him to the water board.

 

lolimac he might to receive a copy of this :nono:
Guidance on the permeable surfacing of front gardens - Planning, building and the environment - Department for Communities and Local Government

 

Blimey Bilbo, that's awful! Fair enough cut your own hedges down if you wish,even cutting branches overlapping from other gardens into your own but to lean over into someone elses property to prune below their own fence line is bang out of order.

You must speak to him about it as dim says and let him know that in the future you will prune your own trees/shrubs.

I dont know what he thought he would gain from such aggresive pruning.

Steve...

 

I think some people see trees and hedges as assets and others see them as robbers of light and space. My father was a bit like that; he'd fret about some poor innocent tree 'blocking the sunshine' and wouldn't stop moaning until it had been reduced to a stump. Mind you - a 20ft conifer hedge? That's some hedge. I was idly looking through the Rightmove site the other day and chanced upon a very nice house at a fairly reasonable price. Then I saw a picture of the garden. On the other side of the bottom fence lurked a row of leylandii. Feathery babies, at the moment, just poking the odd wispy frond over the parapet - but give it a couple of years and they may well have metamorphosed into huge, nasty thugs. The thought of a running battle with the neighbour to get the things tamed was enough to put me off enquiring further. The house has been on the market some time, so perhaps I'm not the only one to have these thoughts.

 

I would go fruitloop if he'd done that to me !!

 

Now that is a must see, Evil Len going Fruitloop

 

Thanks for the replies guys, funny thing was despite his over confident and arrogrant pruning regime every time I went in the garden to do something, thinking I might have a 'friendly' conversation he'd conviently toddle off to take something to skip or prune something that was at ankle height....!!!

I'll be keeping a close eye on his "horticultural" activities in future; when he comes near our hedge anyway..

The Elder tree he 'butchered' is on Council land I think, its sort of a tiny patch of no mans land but is right at the end of hedge if that makes sense....???

I like the saying "what goes around comes around", he won't know yet but he has in dropping the height of hedge also opened his garden up to the prevailing winds here, he'll find out all about those next time we get some westerly gales :D

 

Perfect. There's some folklore about Elderberry trees that you could tell him.

Ask him if he asked the tree for permission to cut its wood before he cut it, and if he thanked it afterwards. When he looks at you like you've gone mad, just put on your joking face and tell him its just some old folklore that powerful spirits reside in the Elderberry tree, and if you don't show them respect, they will see that bad luck falls upon you.

Naturally he'll just think you're mad, but every time anything bad happens in his garden, such as this gale you speak of knocking all his plants over, it'll be on the back of his mind.

 

lol Clueless..."mind games"..

Steve...